Dennis Young: Owners like Dan Snyder and Kelly Loeffler aren't going anywhere
The ask from WNBA players was crystal clear: Force Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) to sell her stake in the Atlanta Dream after a series of racist comments about protesters and Black Lives Matter. “ENOUGH, OUT!” the players’ union spelled out in a statement. “Get her weak a-- out of our league,” Natasha Cloud said, which was representative of the dozens of players who ultimately called for Loeffler’s removal.
The responses from Loeffler and the league were clear, too: Go to hell.
“They can’t push me out for my views,” Loeffler told ESPN. “I intend to own the team. I am not going.” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert confirmed that the league wouldn’t even try, saying “We’re not going to force her to sell her ownership.”
Loeffler made her first comments about “mob rule” in Atlanta on June 24; players were mostly quiet until June 29, when Shalise Young wrote a Yahoo column headlined “Why is Kelly Loeffler still a WNBA co-owner despite ‘Donald Sterling vibes’?”
But there are two key differences between the ownership scandals currently roiling sports and what happened with Sterling. The first is that NBA players from six teams, including Sterling’s Clippers, were ready to boycott playoff games. The second is that Sterling ultimately sold the team for $2 billion. Neither the stick nor the carrot is present for Loeffler. WNBA players have not said that they’ll boycott games for or against the Dream. It’s tremendously unfair to put the burden for ousting evil owners on the players, but it’s less a passing of moral responsibility — which rightly sits with leagues and other owners — than a statement of fact. If an owner’s actions aren’t causing major business disruptions, then the league doesn’t care.
And while franchise sale prices are almost never disclosed in the WNBA, it’s a good guess that the parachute awaiting Loeffler in a sale would be more nylon than gold. It took James Dolan 14 months to find a buyer for the Liberty once he put the team on the market, for example.
That, too, is the key difference between Loeffler and the other instances of racist owners selling their teams immediately after their cancellations. When Bruce Levenson miraculously found an oafish email that enabled him to sell the Hawks, he sold his stake in the team for $850 million; when Jerry Richardson was reported to be a chronic racist and sexual harasser, he sold the Panthers for $2.2 billion.
That doesn’t quite explain Dan Snyder and Woody Johnson, who could command record-setting 10-figure payouts if they were forced to sell their teams. The extent to which the NFL is going to punish Snyder after a damning portrait of his business as a den of sexual harassment and verbal abuse? “The NFL will seriously consider fining” the franchise, according to the Washington Post. And while it’s early days in the Johnson scandals, it’s clear that the Jets owner thinks he has nothing to apologize for. In a statement Wednesday, Johnson did not even deny a report that he acted corruptly as U.K. ambassador, just saying that he hadn’t broken any rules, and he brushed off the report of his sexist and racist comments as fake news.
The Johnson and Snyder reports meant that fully 10% of NFL owners have been involved in major scandals in the last year. Bob Kraft paid for a little extra service at a Florida massage parlor on the morning of an AFC championship game; with that video successfully suppressed, so are any consequences for Kraft. It’s no accident that the other 29 owners haven’t pushed out their peers.
Adam Silver’s reputation as a progressive commissioner is rooted in the fact that he bounced Sterling just two months into his tenure. But kicking Sterling out of the club wasn’t a moral decision; it was a business one. Snyder and Loeffler have no interest in selling, and their peers have decided that keeping them around would harm the bottom line less than a fight to get them to sell. That’s it.
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